Bach Festival Branching Out To Allentown

May 08, 1994|by BRYAN HAY, The Morning Call

As it rehearses for its 87th festival, which opens Thursday night at Lehigh University, the Bach Choir of Bethlehem also has its eyes set on the road.

For this year's festival, the choir and Festival Orchestra will venture outside Bethlehem and take their music and traditions to Allentown for an 8 p.m. "Highlights of the Festival" concert May 19 in First Presbyterian Church, Tilghman Street and Cedar Crest Boulevard.

According to a choir spokesman, it's the first time that the entire Bach Choir has performed in Allentown.

Further ahead awaits an experience eagerly anticipated by the choir, instrumentalists and tag-alongs -- a two-week tour of Germany in 1995 to include concert stops at Eisenach, the town of Bach's birth, and Leipzig, where the composer spent the last 27 years of his life.

Both trips symbolize the choir's growing reputation, audience appeal and need to branch out and touch new listeners, said music director and conductor Greg Funfgeld.

A few years back, when the organization embarked on its capital campaign, a consultant polledbusiness and arts leaders in the Lehigh Valley, asking for opinions about the choir and how to make it more accessible.

Although the Bach Choir considers itself part of the cultural life of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania and the United States, "one of the things we heard from people was that there was a sense that the choir was a Bethlehem organization," Funfgeld said, noting that Allentown had an unfulfilled appetite for Bach.

"I'm always amazed that, even in Bethlehem, how many people say to me `I've always wanted to hear the Bach Choir but I had just never gotten to it,' " he said. "Or they think you can't get tickets -- that it's sort of a closed shop. And it really isn't."

Tickets are available for the "Highlights" May 19 in Allentown, as well as for an identical program at 8 p.m. Thursday in Packer Church, Lehigh University. Tickets are also available for the Saturday morning instrumental programs both festival weekends. A limited number of tickets also may be available for the festival. Call the Bach Choir office or stop at the choir's office during the festival at the Catacombs in the basement of Packer Church.

Funfgeld said the Bach Choir has something exciting to share, in terms of its great tradition and a mission to widen the circulation of the glorious music of Bach.

"And also because we're trying to reach out to more people and broaden our base of support as well, which is incumbent upon any arts organization these days," he added.

Allentown's First Presbyterian Church is a good place to start the outreach, Funfgeld noted, because of its good location, acoustics, seating capacity and parking.

The "Highlights" program, to be presented Thursday night at Packer Church, has been a first-weekend festival tradition.

Funfgeld said the choir's festival performances will be energized by its travel itinerary, particularly the German tour, July 19 to Aug. 2, 1995. It will take the musicians to key Bach monuments, including the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas Church), where he spent his last years and wrote his greatest works, among them the Mass in B minor. Bach's remains are buried in the high altar there.

Funfgeld recently returned from the meeting of the American Bach Society at Emory University, Atlanta, where he got a warm early welcome from the president of the Lutheran seminary in Leipzig.

"I think it's very exciting to think of the oldest Bach Choir in the United States going back to the place where a lot of this music was heard for the first time," he said. "We're going to share and we're going to learn. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity."

The Bach Choir previously toured Germany and the former East Germany as part of its 1976 Bicentennial tour, performing at Philharmonie Hall, Berlin and St. Thomas Church, Leipzig.

As far as the festival goes, audiences will get to share the enjoyment of hearing three cantatas never heard before at the festival. Two of them show how Bach plagiarized himself. Cantatas will be presented Friday and May 20 at Packer. The Mass in B minor will be performed Saturday afternoon and May 21.

Bach wrote Cantata 12 early in his career and later used the choral movement for the basis for the "Crucifixus" in the B minor Mass. Returning to the work some 30 years later and using a part of it for the central part of the Mass says a lot about how he felt about the cantata, Funfgeld said.

Bach also borrowed a chorus from Cantata 120 and put it in the Mass. The other festival premiere is Cantata 129, a chorale cantata based on a hymn that was popular in Bach's time.

"It's a bright and sunshiny piece -- very positive with lilting melodies and wonderful fanfares for the trumpets and exuberant choral music in the opening and closing choruses," he added.